Paper 2020/531

Centralized or Decentralized? The Contact Tracing Dilemma

Serge Vaudenay

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created a noticeable challenge to the cryptographic community with the development of contact tracing applications. The media reported a dispute between designers proposing a centralized or a decentralized solution (namely, the PEPP-PT and the DP3T projects). Perhaps, the time constraints to develop and deploy efficient solutions led to non-optimal (in terms of privacy) solutions. Moreover, arguments have been severely biased and the scientific debate did not really happen until recently. In this paper, we show the vulnerabilities and the advantages of both solutions systematically. We believe that none offers any sufficient level of privacy protection and the decision to use one or another is as hard as using automated contact tracing at the first place. A third way could be explored. We list here a few possible directions.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
COVID-19trackingsecurityprivacy
Contact author(s)
serge vaudenay @ epfl ch
History
2020-05-07: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/531
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/531,
      author = {Serge Vaudenay},
      title = {Centralized or Decentralized? The Contact Tracing Dilemma},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/531},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/531}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/531}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.